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dingusdev / dingusppc

An experimental emulator
GNU General Public License v3.0
200 stars 21 forks source link

BeOS? #35

Open memsom opened 1 year ago

memsom commented 1 year ago

There is currently no emulator that can emulate the PowerPC version of BeOS. If you were to get to the point this boots to MacOS, and emulates a PCI Mac with a 603 or 604 processor, it would be very cool to get BeOS running on it. BeOS booted on 7300, 8500, 9500 among others. Any chance one of those might work in the future?

maximumspatium commented 1 year ago

In short, the chances to get BeOS emulated in dingusppc are good.

I already created a basic emulator for TNT-style machines, see https://github.com/dingusdev/dingusppc/blob/master/machines/machinetnt.cpp We even made a significant progress towards emulation of the on-board video for those Macs. Open Firmware 1.0.5 resided in a TNT ROM works well in dingusppc.

Booting to Mac OS doesn't currently work due to incomplete SCSI hard disk emulation. That's what we're currently working on. Booting to BeOS will probably require a working SCSI CD-ROM too.

We will actually get there but it will take some time.

memsom commented 1 year ago

@maximumspatium how is the progress on the hard disk emulation? I saw a branch with a lot of commits - is it anywhere near worth trying out yet?

maximumspatium commented 1 year ago

While a basic SCSI hard disk and CD-ROM emulation has been recently added to Dingusppc the machines you'd need for BeOS don't boot yet. There are still missing parts, most notably ADB emulation responsible for user input (keyboard & mouse). I'm currently working on ADB support. It will take a couple of weeks. I'm going to try out BeOS as soon as our virtual TNT/Gazelle machines are able to boot into Mac OS.

memsom commented 1 year ago

That is great news. If you need any support let me know. I do have a known working image from an SD to IDE adapter (Action Retro used it on his youtube channel to boot BeOS) and so if that in any way helps, I can link you it. The image will mount in MacOS X and you can extract the individual partitions, so you might be able to use them even under a scsi emulation.

The Mac hfs partition is super small (~2mb) so it has a lot less going on than a regular MacOS install (based on an 8.1 Disk Tools image.) It is just there to bootstrap BeOS.

Lucas-mother3 commented 7 months ago

Hmmm, I'm interested with this project as currently, BeOS before R3.0 is not emulated enough. I'm also interested with this to try out Mac OS functionality. That raises the question of what exactly is happening with the support. Is it now kinda possible to boot from those CDs or are there hurdles to jump over?

memsom commented 7 months ago

Hmmm, I'm interested with this project as currently, BeOS before R3.0 is not emulated enough.

BeOS for PowerPC is not emulated at all. I don't know what the status is currently, but I think you would only be able to go back to PR1, maybe AA with this solution. Anything prior to that is problematic as there was only one release of BeOS from the DR days that supported Mac and that version is hard to come by in an installable state because the installer has expired now.

Lucas-mother3 commented 7 months ago

Anything prior to that is problematic as there was only one release of BeOS from the DR days that supported Mac and that version is hard to come by in an installable state because the installer has expired now.

DR8? Or the MacWorld Preview? Either way, I do think it might work if you could set the time back to when it didn't expire but that's on me, I don't really know if it's possible actually.